I’m delighted to announce that I can now show you the Cover Reveal for my new Luminarie edition of Mystical Circles!

It’s been a long and sometimes fraught journey with the cover designers but I’m very excited with the final result!

Read two reviews here from young adult authors:

Intense Psychological Drama in a Beautiful Setting

First of all, I fell in love with the beautiful house where the story is set, and wanted to go there immediately! Against this backdrop, a tense and intriguing psychological drama is worked out, with new twists and revelations every day. The complex and often damaged characters gathered together react and interact more often than not in ways that surprise and sometimes shock, and you are kept guessing about the outcomes of some of the relationships until the very end. This was an intense and compelling story with many twists and turns in the plot to keep you reading. (Eleanor Watkins, YA author )

Psychological Suspense That Doesn’t Disappoint

The scene is an idyllic Cotswold farmhouse, where a mixed bag of needy people live in a community. Enter journalist Juliet, seeking to save her younger sister from the clutches of what she considers a cult, with its charismatic and enigmatic leader, Craig. Like Juliet, we are drawn into the claustrophobic lives of the characters in this “Wheel of Love” and find ourselves unable to leave. As the emotional and psychological tensions crackle and ignite against each other, it’s like watching a slow-motion train crash of the conflicting personalities, desires, jealousies and hurts. If you like your drama filled with psychological suspense, with a hint of the paranormal, then you won’t be disappointed. I’m pleased to see there’s a sequel, A Passionate Spirit. (Philip S Davies, YA author)

So without more ado here is the book cover for Mystical Circles.

Blurb:

“Hi, you in crowded, stressed old London from me in the peaceful, perfect Cotswolds. Massive change of plan. I’m in love. Craig’s gorgeous, sexy, intelligent. Paradise here. Staying forever.”

Juliet, concerned that her younger sister has fallen in love with the charismatic Craig, leader of the Wheel of Love, sets off for the Cotswolds to investigate, fearful that Zoe has become entangled with a religious cult.

She arrives at Craig’s community hoping to rescue Zoe. But intrigues, liaisons and relationships flare and flourish or fizzle out quickly within this close circle, and despite her reservations, Juliet is drawn into the Wheel of Love… with completely unforeseen consequences.

The new Luminarie edition of Mystical Circles is available as from 5 September 2017. It will be available online and in all good bookstores.

And I am doing a special promotion for a limited period for UK readers of this blog. Copies of the paperback can be pre-ordered direct from me via the Contact Me section of this blog, at 20% discount from the RRP of £8.99, and free of p& p. There will be 10 copies of the book available through this promotion to the first 10 purchasers, and all I ask is that you post your review on Amazon as soon as you’ve read the book!

I am reblogging this booklist by Kirsty Brown, published as a guest post on one of the blogs I follow, Jenny in Neverland. I thought this an excellent list and liked Kirsty’s inclusion of some iconic books for young women which are among my personal favourites, including Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and Anne Frank’s Diary.

Now to see us out on my guest post week, I have an absolutely wonderful post from Kirsty Brown about the 10 books that ever young woman should read. Shamefully, I haven’t actually read any of these but they are most definitely on my radar now and a few trips to the library is definitely in order. Have you read any of these? Have a read of Kirsty’s brilliant post and thank you for joining me on guest post week, whilst I’ve been away. And thank you to the amazing guest posters, too!

I already have the new cover design and it’s very exciting indeed! I love it and I hope and believe you will too.

The new cover will express a much darker mood, as does the cover design of A Passionate Spirit,with some significant variations… this will update the branding of the two thriller suspense novels which explore strange and paranormal happenings in the same idyllic Cotswold location… a beautiful manor house in a hidden valley deep in Gloucestershire.

Watch this space – the brand new edition with its fabulous new cover will be available to pre-order on 1st August. And that’s the day when I’ll feature the Cover Reveal on this blog.

The publication date is 5th September.

Also out on 5th September from Luminarie will be the new edition of Perilous Path: A Writer’s Journey.

“Perilous Path A Writer’s Journey” by SC Skillman ISBN: 9781999707323

This is my inspirational writer’s guide, packed full of helpful and encouraging tips, insights and reminders for writers.

Both these Luminarie editions will be available to pre-order on 1st August when I’ll have the cover reveal of Mystical Circles edition 3 for you.

And if you haven’t already ordered your copy of A Passionate Spirit, get the paperback here .

I have long loved wildflower meadows, and thought how lovely it would be to have one instead of a garden. But creating a wildflower meadow isn’t just a matter of buying a few packets of seeds and scattering them over a piece of unwanted lawn. Several years ago I did just that and waited, hoping for a glorious profusion of wildflowers several months later and the result was – nil.

In May 2016 we attended a Plantlife talk at Highgrove, the Prince of Wales’ beautiful garden near Tetbury, Gloucestershire, and came away with two packets of wildflower seeds.These seeds were a special Highgrove mix – enough for a small patch of wildflower meadow in the garden.

We now knew that to plant a wildflower meadow in your garden you need poor soil, perhaps an area of “old lawn”, and certainly not lawn or soil which has been fertilised and carefully tended in the past. So we chose a wild area.

Last August my son Jamie (a budding horticulturalist) sowed the seeds in a a patch measuring 4 square metres in our back garden.

We didn’t expect much in the first year; a wildflower meadow may take a few years to become fully established. In fact I must admit I expected that during the first year we’d have just a small jungle of weeds, and would need to wait and trust that the beauty would emerge in a few years.

But this July we’re delighted to see the wild grasses tall and shining in the sun, and among them, a few of the first wildflowers to appear.

It gives us great pleasure to look out beyond the more “domesticated” beds of rose and lavender, past the newly-sown area of lawn, to our little area of Highgrove wildflower meadow.

It will be mown for the first time in September, and then after that four times a year.

Next year we hope to see a profusion of colours and perhaps a small version of the lovely wildflower meadow at Highgrove!

For more posts from me about wildflowers and Highgrove, click here and here

I’d love to know what you think about wildflower meadows! Have you ever tried to create your own meadow in your garden? And how successful have you been?

I’m delighted to host author Vivienne Tuffnell today on my blog. I’ve followed Vivienne’s blog Zen and the Art of Tightrope Walking now for several years, and reblogged one of her posts here; I’ve also read four of her previous books: Depression and the Art of Tightrope Walking, Square Peg, Away With the Fairies and Hallowed Hollow. Today she is here to talk about her inspiration for her new novel Little Gidding Girl.

Here is the blurb for the story:

At seventeen, Verity lost the future she’d craved when Nick, her enigmatic and troubled poet boyfriend, drowned at sea. At thirty-five, in a safe, humdrum and uninspired life, she finds that snatches of the life she didn’t have begin to force their way into her real life. This other life, more vivid and demanding than her actual life, begins to gather a terrible momentum as she starts to understand that her un-lived life was not the poetic dream she had imagined it might be. Doubting her own sanity as her other life comes crashing down around her in a series of disasters, Verity is forced to re-examine her past, realign her present and somehow reclaim a future where both her own early creative promise and her family can exist and flourish together. Exploring the nature of time itself, the possibilities of parallel universes and the poetic expressions of both, Verity searches to understand why and how Nick really died and what her own lives, lived and un-lived, might truly mean. ‘From the unknown spaces between what is, was, and will be, messages and sendings break through into Verity’s life: are they nightmares of a parallel reality or projections from a love that has flown? Vivienne Tuffnell keeps us guessing with utmost artistry as we trace the interweaving way-marks in pursuit of the truth. Little Gidding Girl kept me enthralled until the very end.’ – Caitlín Matthews, author of Singing the Soul Back Home, and Diary of a Soul Doctor

Now it’s time for Vivienne to tell us how the ideas for this novel first came to her. You’ll find my 5 star review of the novel at the end of this post.

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AUTHOR VIVIENNE TUFFNELL:

“We’re all mad here,”- the inspirations behind Little Gidding Girl.

One of the questions most writers get asked from time to time is “Where do you get your ideas?” and it’s also the most difficult to answer because it varies enormously for each writer and for every book. But being asked, “What was the inspiration behind your book?” is often simpler because it’s more precise. So when Sheila asked me about the inspiration behind Little Gidding Girl, the real difficulty was casting my mind back about fourteen years ago to a period when I was almost bursting with creativity and ideas and winnow out what really inspired that particular book.

We’d moved to a new area and that is something that is always unsettling and unnerving, and within a few months of arriving I began writing again. I’d turned my back on writing for all sorts of reasons. Roadblocks where agents and publishers would take up a book with interest and then reject it or ask me to rewrite and then reject it again, created such tension in me that I became ill, almost fatally so, and to save my health and my sanity, I stopped writing altogether. Eight years had passed where I’d written nothing longer than a letter, when a whole novel sprang to my mind and poured out almost uncontrollably in an unprecedented flood. More novels followed, Little Gidding Girl being among them, but its origins lie (as almost always for me) within the unconscious mind.

I’d begun dreaming again. Powerful, vivid, compelling and often lucid dreams that left me exhausted and haunted. One afternoon, I had a snooze and thought I’d woken up, and was getting dressed in brand new jeans that required a coat-hanger to ease the zip up, when my son burst into the room demanding something or other. He hadn’t knocked and I was upset and cross with him, and humiliated because the jeans were so tight, I had visible muffin-tops of fat spilling over the waistband.

The thing is, I don’t have a son.

I’ve never had a son, only a daughter, who at that stage was in her early teens. I woke again, properly this time, rather shocked and shaken by this experience. I made a note of the dream and let it go. More odd dreams followed. In one I was in a school science lab, attempting to teach something I didn’t understand, when the lab bench started to fade in and out and be replaced by a flower bed. In another, I went to the bottom of my garden to discover a massive trench (like in Time Team) and a row of shelves with finds laid out on them. But the finds were all modern rubbish and not archaeology.

A whole series of extraordinary dreams occurred, leaving me spell-bound and baffled, because they all seemed to connect to a life I’d never had but might have done. Like many women, I’ve experienced the loss of pregnancy in miscarriages. I’ve never grieved much, for those potential babies, but I have always felt a tiny bit sad that life circumstances and the revelation that I’m not much good with babies and children led me to decide that one child was all I should have. In another universe I might have been one of those earth-mother types, perhaps, but not in this one.

Around the same time, I’d begun to be a bit obsessed with Four Quartets. I’d never studied it at university, and a quote somewhere set me to seek out a copy and read it. It seemed to hold so much, so much that science and religion in their blunter, less mystical forms, simply did not express in ways I could relate to. I began to think about the paths I never took, the doors I never opened, the rose gardens I never stepped into, and it felt like the dreams were showing me glimpses of those other realities that never happened. Any belief that other paths might have been nicer, sweeter or more successful than the one I did take soon began to crumble. In the Narnia books, Aslan says that no one is ever told what would have happened, and yet, sometimes I believe we are shown a tiny vision of the other lives we might have lived. Sometimes it’s to comfort us, sometimes it’s to inspire us but always it is to root us in the reality of what is rather than what might have been.

In Little Gidding Girl, the might-have-beens become the growing focus of Verity’s attention, forcing their way through in powerful ways that leave her unsettled and unstable. My agent asked me if she was insane and I still don’t know how to answer that. It makes me think of Alice in Wonderland:

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

Perhaps now, like the Alice speaking to the Mad Hatter, I’d say: “I’m afraid so. You’re entirely bonkers. But I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are.”

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Thank you Vivienne – this gives a fascinating insight into the background to your novel. I too have long been interested in paying attention to and recording dreams, and to learn that you were inspired to write Little Gidding Girl by your dreams particularly intrigues me.

MY REVIEW OF LITTLE GIDDING GIRL

A very sensitive book which represents an unusual exploration of grief and blends it with the philosophy expressed by TS Eliot in his poem ‘Little Gidding’ from ‘The Four Quartets’. The main protagonist Verity is living with unresolved emotions from the accidental death of her boyfriend nineteen years earlier. Though her present-day marriage is ostensibly happy and her life relatively comfortable, she has never stopped engaging on an unconscous level with the life she imagines she would have lived, had that boyfriend not died. Vivienne Tuffnell handles the female relationships in Verity’s life with sharp perception and wit, and I loved her descriptions of the New Age shop that Verity works in, whilst being exploited by the rather unpleasant owner of the shop, manipulative therapist Juliet. Verity’s “visions” of that alternative life are also handled in such a way that the reader strongly feels their weirdness and they carry a considerable shock factor in the narrative. Earlier on in the story I found Verity’s present-day husband a little too gentle and calm and sympathetic, but later on we come to share some of his own turbulent feelings at the strange inner journey his wife is taking. I loved this quote near the end of the story: That’s what grief is. A little bit of us dies when our loved ones do. We go down into death with them while the grief endures. When the grief pales we return with what gifts our loved ones gave us in life. A very thoughtful and haunting novel.